Feingold will reclaim the maverick mantel

Russ Feingold will almost certainly reclaim his U.S. Senate seat next year and for the same reason he lost it in 2010: the nature of who shows up to vote.

Feingold lost in 2010, an off-year election in which the electorate was older, whiter and more conservative. And that year those voters were particularly ornery, reacting against Obamacare and the economic stimulus package. The stimulus had been shown to be pretty successful, and the Affordable Care Act hadn’t even been fully implemented yet, but no matter.

It also didn’t matter that Feingold was personally popular and widely regarded as more than competent for the job or that he was running against Ron Johnson, a man with no experience in politics or public service whatsoever. In 2010, the angry and the conservative were motivated, while too many dispirited liberals stayed home.

But next year will be different. A presidential year will bring out voters who are younger, more diverse and generally more liberal. Feingold retains his personal appeal, and Johnson proved to be every bit the amateur he promised to be. So, it’s no great risk to predict that Feingold will be sent back to Washington with a comfortable margin.

The biggest irony of Feingold’s defeat in 2010 was that he lost in an anti-Washington wave. Nobody had earned a stronger outsider reputation than Russ Feingold. He called out his colleagues for their coziness with lobbyists, Wall Street and other captains of industry. He was scrupulous in his attention to ethics and campaign finance rules. He rubbed Washington the wrong way and had the enmity of his colleagues to show for it.

And yet Wisconsin voters tossed aside the true outsider for a man with insider predilections who just happened to have no governmental experience at all. Ron Johnson is the worst of both worlds — a captive of special interests who also doesn’t understand how government works.

Which brings me to my point. It’s good to have a few people in Washington like Feingold or his Wisconsin predecessors in the art of the maverick, like Bill Proxmire and Robert La Follette. They keep government honest, but they don’t necessarily make government work.

For that you need personalities that are more like the Wisconsin senator I admire the most, Gaylord Nelson. Nelson was also a man of principle, but he got along with everybody because he didn’t pose for holy pictures or lecture his colleagues or try to show them up. He was not self-righteous or pedantic. He didn’t take himself too seriously, and he had a sense of humor, mostly about himself. He enjoyed mixing it up with his colleagues socially over “a cocktail or three,” as he used to like to say. In fact, Nelson was voted the most popular senator among his colleagues on both sides of the aisle. And among his many accomplishments, his most lasting legislative victory is probably Wisconsin’s only national park, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. He got that done in large measure not by demeaning government but by understanding how it works and knowing how to be effective with those who control its levers.

When it comes to running against Washington, Feingold is the real deal. But for most politicians, that’s just rhetoric. Everybody runs against Washington. Orin Hatch, Mitch McConnell, John McCain. Senators with a combined 100 years of service in D.C. each ran aggressive and successful campaigns portraying themselves as outsiders.

Aside from the obvious cynicism that breeds in voters who don’t like being pandered to, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Running for the House, Senate or the presidency is like applying for no other job. It’s as if someone wanted to work for General Motors and came to the job interview to say they hated Detroit and cars in general, and that, in fact, they had never even learned how to drive and hoped they would never be forced to do so.

Candidates for national office — job applicants — compete for just how incompetent they are at the job they propose to fill.

I would rather have politicians who leveled with me and who said something like, “I want to go to Washington because I’m good at government. Washington is filled with a lot of hard-working people who really want to do what’s right for the country. I’m not going to feed you a line about how I’m going to change Washington, because that’s just not going to happen, and in some ways it shouldn’t. I want to go there because I think I understand how it does work day-to-day, and I want to make it work even better. Also, it’s a really cool town with some great bars.”

Instead, I can pretty much guarantee you that all of the 536 people who serve in Congress and the presidency ran against the city they now go to work in and everything it represents. I don’t know of a single organization that could function well with its leaders running it down like that. Part of the job of leaders is to inspire, to find the good things in an organization and emphasize those while trying to eliminate the bad stuff. But for politicians running to lead our national government — Democrats as well as Republicans — they feel the need to damn the entire institution. This is a prescription for disaster because we get the government we expect.

So, is it a good thing that a genuine outsider in Russ Feingold will return to Washington? Sure, but the real maverick I’d like to see is one who is honest enough to say that he actually wants to be there.